After February 1948, he was also a politician of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and promoted Marxist interpretations of linguistics.

He was especially influenced by his meeting with the Russian Slavist and dialectologist Aleksey Shakhmatov.

[2] From 1911 to 1915 he was secretary of the Dialectological Commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts in Prague.

He surrendered and rose to the rank of staff captain of the Czechoslovak legions and became the editor of the Československé listy newspaper.

[4] He founded the Brno branch of the Institute of Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and was its first director.